LIFE ON THE COLOR LINE: The True...

LIFE ON THE COLOR LINE: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black by Gregory Howard Williams (Plume/Penguin: $12.95; 285 pp., illustrated). The author of this Times Book Award-winning autobiography spent his childhood in the segregated South of the 1950s, believing himself white. When his braggart father’s alcoholism destroyed his parents’ marriage, Gregory Howard Williams discovered that his father was a light-skinned African American who had been “passing.” Too light to fit easily into the black subculture but dismissed as “colored” by whites, Williams existed in a lonely in-between world. His incisive memoir recalls the work of Geoffrey Wolff, whose “The Duke of Deception” also described the trauma of growing up with a con man for a father, but the racial elements of Williams’ story intensify the bitterness of the deceptions.